Menu

Globally Government is struggling to get into Cloud: Why?

This is a good story canvassing most of the issues. I suspect one reason governments are slow to the cloud is that decision-making moves at a different pace to private industry and public servants are far more fearful of risk. Yes, I know cloud computing is less risky, but they don’t.

In the past few years most Western Governments have put in place a “Cloud First Policy.” A piece of paper that exhorts government agencies to look at Cloud services before traditional purchasing methods. But when you look at New Zealand, the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom, the uptake is very low and slow. Where the rest of the world is moving carefully to Cloud, government is being left behind, and it will cost us.

In 2011 the then US Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra instituted the Federal Cloud Computing Strategy, which established a Cloud First policy for government. Three years on the progress to Cloud is extremely slow and problematic, according to an Accenture report that surveyed 286 government technology leaders. The results were interesting:

Of the twenty cloud migration plans submitted to the Government Accountability Office for approval in 2012, only one has been completed. Eleven…